He died in flames — but for decades, he burned with the incandescent glow of his own off-kilter brilliance. Learn about the singular Vivian Stanshall… the man who had his fingers in mainstream and oddball classics like the Bonzo Dog Band’s “Rhinocratic Oaths,” Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells,” Stevie Winwood’s ARC OF A DIVER and his own RAWLINSON’S END in this edition of NOTES.

Even after nearly 700 years, Occam’s Razor remains sharp and useful — but not everybody knows of its existence or understands its importance.

Occam’s Razor is a philosophical precept invented by the 14th Century friar, William of Ockham. It states: “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.” That’s a fancy, 14th century way of saying, “The simplest answer is usually the correct one.”

In 1999, when they found Philip Taylor Kramer, the brilliant engineer and former bassist in Iron Butterfly, at the bottom of southern California’s Decker Canyon, he was just a skeleton. The flesh had been stripped from his bones, presumably by rats. Police said that was to be expected; after all, his body had lain undetected in the wilderness area for more than three years.

What was harder to explain was that Kramer’s 1993 Ford Aerostar minivan had also been stripped — of its license plates, that is. They were never found, and that was just one of the strange facts which led many of his friends and family to conclude Kramer hadn’t died accidentally.

But was he murdered? We may never know for sure, and your take on Kramer’s death will probably be dictated by whether or not you choose to apply Occam’s Razor.

When we left Kramer’s tragic story last, the video compression company he co-founded, Total Multimedia (TMM), was floundering and Kramer himself was in massive debt. Kramer had begun to combine his knowledge of data compression with the study of gravity waves. He was inspired by his own father’s effort to disprove Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity during the 1960s at Ohio State University. He worked late in his lab, forgoing sleep for sometimes days on end.

Meanwhile, TMM’s board of directors had hired a new CEO to improve the company’s bottom line. Peter Olson had won accolades as a canny manager at the communications giant, MCI, but once ensconced at TMM, he proved to be a New Age flake, hiring South American shamans to offer business advice and requiring his staff to read James Redfield’s spiritualist novel, THE CELESTINE PROPHECY. Olson’s credulity rubbed off on Kramer, who began requiring his family to wear only certain colors, and who became convinced O.J. Simpson was the innocent victim of a nefarious conspiracy plot. Kramer was beginning to show the classic signs of extreme paranoia. He was convinced someone was trying to get his research, which he told friends was worth billions.

Finally, on February 12, 1995, he left his home and went to the airport. Records show he stayed there for about 45 minutes, but never met the investor he was there to pick up. Instead, he drove off and began making cell phone calls. He called his old bandmate in Iron Butterfly, Ron Bushy, to say he loved him. He called his wife and told her he had “the biggest surprise” for her. He made 14 other calls, then dialed 911. He told the emergency operator, “I’m going to kill myself. And I want everyone to know O.J. Simpson is innocent. They did it.”

But for Philip Taylor Kramer, one-time bassist with the psychedelic band Iron Butterfly, the truth was down there — at the bottom of Decker Canyon, 300 feet below California State Route 23, to be precise.

Decker Canyon is like the mythic Elephant’s Graveyard, only it isn’t pachyderms which come to die in its poison oak-shrouded ravines, but the cars and trucks which at various times have plummeted from Route 23’s serpentine curves. One of those now rusted automotive fossils is a green 1993 Ford Aerostar minivan. That was the vehicle Kramer was driving on February 12, 1995, the last day he was seen alive. In May of 1999, more than four years after Kramer vanished, his skeletal remains were found in and around the minivan by a pair of hikers. How Kramer’s Aerostar got to the bottom of Decker Canyon is either a very simple story or a very complicated one, depending on how far “out there” you are prepared to go in search of the truth.

If you remember Iron Butterfly at all, it’s probably on the strength of their one Top 40 hit, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” from 1968. That infamous song (the title of which was originally “In the Garden of Eden” but was changed because lead singer Doug Ingle was so drunk on red wine during the recording session that he couldn’t properly pronounce it) was over 17 minutes long in its album version, and was a popular early example of “acid rock.”

Kramer didn’t play on that famous recording; he joined a later incarnation of the band formed by original drummer Ron Bushy during the mid-’70s and can only be heard on the Butterfly’s now virtually forgotten SCORCHING BEAUTY and SUN AND STEEL albums. When the band dissolved for a second time in 1977, Kramer got a haircut and went to night school to study aerodynamic engineering. Upon graduation, the budding physicist snagged a job with the military contractor Northrop Grumman, where he did highly classified work on the guidance system of the MX missile. According to a fellow Northrop employee, very few of his co-workers knew about his rock star past.

By the late 1980s, Kramer had become fascinated by the incipient field of media compression and had helped form a company called Total Multimedia Inc. Using groundbreaking mathematical techniques developed by Kramer, TMM (as it is still known) introduced the first commercial video codec utilizing so-called fractal compression. Although the technology was licensed to a handful of videogames in the mid-’90s, it proved to be too time-intensive for widespread use. (Encoding just one minute of video could take a network of dedicated servers up to 15 hours.) By 1994, TMM was fighting for its life in bankruptcy court and Kramer — by now a husband and father of two children — was in massive debt.

Next week in this space, we’ll learn more of the strange story of how Philip Taylor Kramer, rock star-turned-rocket scientist, wound up at the bottom of Decker Canyon… what roles O.J. Simpson and THE CELESTINE PROPHECY payed in his ballistic arc… and why some of Kramer’s friends and family, in the years following his disappearance, adopted another of Fox Mulder’s favorite sayings: “Trust no one.”

She may have been young when she recorded with brother Larry in the 1950s, but Lorrie Collins was a real “Rock Boppin’ Baby.”

The Collins Kids were young and squeaky clean — but that didn’t stop thousands of rockabilly fans from fantasizing about pretty Lorrie Collins. Learn more about Lorrie and her brother Larry in this episode of NOTES.

Like the country itself, American music is a melting pot. Its songs come to us from many different walks of life and parts of the world. Today, let’s look at how some of America’s best-loved standards were given to us by a small, balding and bespectacled German Socialist.

Kurt Weill did not cut a studly figure, but he is remembered today (64 years after his passing) as one of the greatest composers of the musical theatre stage, and many of his songs still weave a spell over audiences whose parents weren’t born yet when he died. What’s your favorite genre? Chances are, some artist you like has covered a Weill song. You dig jazz or the Rat Pack? Then you have probably enjoyed Weill’s “September Song,” which has also been covered by Bing Crosby, Lindsey Buckingham and Lou Reed, just to name a few.

Or are you a fan of classic rock? Then it’s probable you have sang along at some point with Jim Morrison on the Doors’ cover of Weill’s “Alabama Song” (aka “Whiskey Bar” or “Moon Over Alabama”), which the L.A. band recorded almost 40 years after Weill wrote the song.

And then, of course, there is Weill’s best-known song, “Mack the Knife,” which was a #1 hit for Bobby Darin the week Craven was born, and which has also been recorded by Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Nick Cave, among many others. The song (known as “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” in its original form) might never have existed had an actor in one of the musicals Weill co-wrote with playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht not complained that his entrance wasn’t “special” enough.

It was with Brecht that Weill had his first big success in his native Germany, composing songs for plays like HAPPY END and DIE DRIEGROSCHENOPER (the latter of which we know here as THE THREEPENNY OPERA, and from which emerged “Mack the Knife” in 1928). Brecht and Weill’s work was popular, but eventually the partnership disintegrated — not over money, but politics, instead. Although he considered himself a Socialist, Weill was alienated by Brecht’s tendencies to propagandize for the Left. (“[I am unable to] set the Communist party manifesto to music,” he famously told his wife, actress Lotte Lenya.)

It was political differences of a more desperate measure which also separated Weill from his native country. In 1933, he moved to France to escape the Nazis, then to the United States in 1935. He eventually became an American citizen and did much volunteer work for the war effort during the 1940s. Always influenced by American dance music, Weill continued to draw upon the idioms of his adopted country as he collaborated with other great theatrical luminaries like Maxwell Anderson, Elmer Rice, Langston Hughes, Alan Jay Lerner and Ira Gershwin. He was working on a musical version of that most American of novels, HUCKLEBERRY FINN, when he died from a fatal heart attack in 1950. He died just 12 years after penning the words from “The September Song” he might well have addressed to his wife, Lotte, in that final year:

“Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few…
September, November…
And these few precious days, I’ll spend with you.
These precious days, I’ll spend with you.”

Less well-known than Wanda Jackson to the general public, Janis Martin is nonetheless revered by rockabilly fans for the vivacious, hot-rockin’ singles she released in the 1950s and early 1960s. Learn more about “the female Elvis” in this episode of NOTES.

As Craven posts this, we are less than three weeks past the day in the United States when ghosts and monsters can kick up their bony heels and revel in all things ghastly… but we should remember that ghouls in other parts of the world are not so lucky.

For instance, there is no Halloween in Italy.

But there is “Ognissanti” (All Saints’ Day) on November 1, followed by “Il Giorno dei Morte” (the Day of the Dead) on November 2. It is on this latter date that families bake cookies called “Ossa dei Morte,” or “Bones of the Dead”… a culinary indication that — even without a Halloween — Italians enjoy a pronounced sense of the macabre.

For further proof, one need travel no further than to the local “cinema teatro,” or movie theater, where for more than 40 years, Italian audiences have thrilled to the baleful shocks of the so-called “giallo.” Giallo is the Italian word for “yellow,” and its use to describe horror mysteries dates back to 1929, when Italian publisher Mondadori issued a series of novels bedecked in bright yellow covers and inspired by American hardboiled detective literature.

In 1963, the giallo leapt to the silver screen when cinematographer-turned-director Mario Bava — already a 24-year veteran of the Italian film industry — helmed his story of serial murder called LA RAGAZZA CHE SAPEVA TROPPO, or THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. Starring American genre favorite John Saxon (and featuring characters with the noble name of Craven), THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH established some of the stylistic markers that would come to characterize gialli, and additionally would prove to be a big influence on Sean S. Cunningham’s influential slasher opus FRIDAY THE 13TH nearly 20 years later.

Over the next few decades, Bava would continue to churn out gialli and was soon joined by other filmmakers like Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento. Argento (whose previous credits included co-writing Sergio Leone’s masterpiece ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST) in particular became associated with the giallo genre, and was soon dubbed “the European Hitchcock” for his visually stylish — and relentlessly gory — thrillers.

In 1975, a relatively unsuccessful Italian progressive rock band called Cherry Five was hired to compose the soundtrack for Argento’s latest giallo, the now-classic DEEP RED. Led by keyboardist Claudio Simonetti and guitarist Massimo Morante, Cherry Five changed their name to Goblin for the project — and landed the biggest hit of their career thus far. The soundtrack to DEEP RED topped the Italian pop charts for 12 weeks, and marked the beginning of a long working relationship with Argento.

We’ll talk more about Goblin in the future. Please check back for more on these “dons of the dead.”

Well you could talk about her, say that she was mean. She’d blow your head off, baby, with nitroglycerine.

They were red hot and icy cool. The ladies of rockabilly redefined the role of the female singer in the nascent days of rock n’ roll. Our four-part look at the hep kittens begins with the story of Wanda Jackson, the original “Fujiyama Mama.”

Like some unholy rubber monster from a Japanese daikaiju movie, punk rock of the late 1970s and early ’80s was a chaotic, multi-headed creature.

Sprouting from one wire-hoisted vinyl neck were the pop stars — bands like the United States’ Ramones, Britain’s Buzzcocks and Ireland’s Undertones, whose notion of punk was bubblegum pop played at blistering speed on buzzsaw guitars. Bobbing violently next to them were the political bands like the Clash and Stiff Little Fingers, who saw in punk rock’s populist ethos a platform for their anti-racist, anti-imperialist jeremiads. And then there were the nihilists, the punks whose sloppily played pogo rock and boozy, self-destructive lifestyle were inspired by the pessimistic puke-in-public shenanigans of the Sex Pistols.

The latter camp represented the punk rock that struck the loudest chord in the United States, especially on the west coast. The spirit of late-1970s American youth was typified by director Jon Landis’ cinematic celebration of inarticulate anarchy, ANIMAL HOUSE, which grossed more than 60-million stateside dollars. Simultaneously, the rise of skateboard culture in California set the seedy club stage for bands like the Germs and Henry Rollins’ Black Flag, whose songs like “Lexicon Devil,” “TV Party” and “Six Pack” glorified anomie and apathy in 4/4 time.

But standing out amidst the believe-in-nothing bands that burst onto L.A.’s late-’70s music scene was one group that not only rejected their fellow punkers’ easy indifference, but did so with uncharacteristic instrumental virtuosity and a nod to pop music’s past. X, the Los Angeles-based quartet formed by married couple John Doe and Exene Cervenka, was unlike any other California punk band in almost every way. Eschewing the juvenile profanity of Black Flag in favor of a lyrical poetry that had more to do with Rimbaud and Kerouac than Rotten and Vicious, and substituting the rhythmic precision of rockabilly guitarist Billy Zoom’s amped-up fretwork and classically-trained drummer D.J. Bonebrake’s pounding gallop for the discordant din of their peers, X started to develop a devoted following almost as soon as they formed in 1977.

And they set themselves apart again three years later when they enlisted ex-Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek to produce their first album, LOS ANGELES, for the independent label Slash Records. Manzarek would go on to helm three more long-players for X, becoming almost a fifth member by supplying sinewy organ to songs like “The World’s a Mess (It’s in My Kiss)” and their adrenalized cover of the Doors’ “Soul Kitchen.”

Although X signed with Elektra Records in 1982, saw their music videos placed in high rotation on MTV and even secured a gig on Jerry Lewis’ Muscular Dystrophy telethon(!), they never managed to escape the ghetto of critical adulation. Doe and Cervenka divorced in the late 1980s (with Cervenka later marrying — and divorcing — LORD OF THE RINGS actor Viggo Mortensen), but X never officially broke up, and the band still performs sporadically.

We’ll talk about X’s incendiary career again in this space. I hope you can join us when we further examine a band whose “unheard music” still excites almost 30 years after its recording.

They’ve won their place in the public imagination by hitting gongs… tattling tales and making love connections… but many of television’s best-known game show hosts have led shadowy, alternative lives — as pop singers! Come on down — and learn more about the recording histories of Barris, Convy and Woolery, et al., on this episode of NOTES.

So goes a popular platitude… and in an age that has seen cheap and ubiquitous air travel, giant Wal-Marts swollen with NAFTA-enabled foreign goods, widespread international outsourcing of labor and an Internet that allows a toy store in Hong Kong to reach customers in Peoria, this is one saying that rings true today.

Nor has popular music been entirely immune to this trend. Witness, for example, the astonishing career of pop polyglot Manu Chao.

Since emerging as the leader of the influential French rock band Mano Negra in the late 1980s, Chao has perched on the peak of a globe-girdling tsunami of performers and artists willing to draw from the musical palettes of many different countries in the pursuit of their art. The 53-year-old singer-songwriter is a multi-linguist’s dreamboat, his songs an entoxicating blend of French, Spanish and English lyrics set to an equally eclectic montage of relentless dance beats, South American folk flourishes and comically flatulent synth riffs, leavened liberally with musique-concrete samples galore. Listening to one of his albums is like undertaking an international tour at supersonic speeds — around the world in 80 minutes.

His role as a global synthesist came naturally to the young man born as Oscar Tramor in Spain, but raised in France, the son of well-regarded novelist and journalist Raymond Chao. As a teenager, Chao the younger came under the influence of U.S. rockabilly and British punk rock — especially the Clash. He was also inspired by the music of the Spanish Revolution. He formed his first band, a French rockabilly combo called Les Hot Pants, in the early 1980s.

But in 1986, Chao came together with his brother Tonio and his cousin Santiago Casiriego to create the band that would secure him a place on the world stage of popular music. Mano Negra (named after a Spanish anarchist organization) scored a major French hit with the song “Mala Vida” from their 1988 debut album PATCHANKA, drawing the attention of Virgin Records, which signed the band worldwide the following year.

Over the next five years, Mano Negra became huge stars the world over… except in the United States, where their glossological dexterity made them a marketing challenge. The band called it quits in 1994. But Chao’s career was far from over. Four years later, he issued his debut solo album, CLANDESTINO, which included the huge international hit, “Bongo Bong,” a re-recording of an old Mano Negra number that benefited greatly from its lazy, insistent hook and silly, sotto voce lyrics.

Since then, Chao has continued to defy generic boundaries with subsequent releases like his sophomore effort, PROXIMA ESTACION: ESPERANZA, which found the artist sprinkling Caribbean rhythms into his unique musical stew. Already a superstar in much of the world, and with his profile growing within the United States, it is safe to say there will be more border-crossing to come from this musical alchemist.

We’ll further examine the career of Manu Chao in this space in the near future. Join us then for a look at an artist who, in helping shrink the globe, has enormously expanded the world of pop music.
The world has shrunken.

Another important HEE HAW veteran was Louis Marshall Jones, the bluegrass and gospel great who had gone by the sobriquet of “Grandpa” since he was just out of his teens! In this third and final installment of our look at the “Musical Heroes of HEE HAW,” learn more about the man who gave the world “Mountain Dew” and “Rattler.”

One of the joys of pop music is its capacity to bring together disparate folks — but only one song in musical history ever brought together a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, the girls of the Playboy Mansion, George Clooney’s aunt, the inventor of karaoke and the Chipmunks.

This year, it will be 63 years since the Columbia single, “Come On-A My House,” hit number one on BILLBOARD’s singles chart. The song was a rollicking, nonsensical tease as sung in pseudo-Italian pidgin English by Rosemary Clooney, filled with promises of fruits and treats and, perhaps, something even more delectable:

The song spent eight weeks perched at the apex of the charts and became Clooney’s first gold record. And yet it was a song the beautiful blonde singer from Kentucky bitterly resented having to record.

“Come On-A My House” was already 12 years old when Columbia music director Mitch Miller sent it to Clooney as the follow-up to her Top 40 hit, “Beautiful Brown Eyes.” The song had been written in 1939 by a pair of Armenian-Americans who would each become much better known for very different accomplishments: William Saroyan won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE, just a year after co-writing “Come On-A My House” with his young cousin, Ross Bagdasarian — who, in 1959, under the nom-de-plume of Dave Seville, created the Chipmunks, that trio of helium-voiced rodents which continues to amuse children half a century thence. (ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS: THE SQUEAKQUEL, the Chipmunks’ CGI cinematic offering from 2009, earned over 400-million dollars worldwide.)

“Come On-A My House” was just the sort of cheery novelty bon-bon that Mitch Miller loved. The man who would later be credited as one of the inventors of karaoke (thanks to his series of best-selling albums and TV show, SING ALONG WITH MITCH) was notorious for saddling great singers with ridiculous, gimmicky songs. (A month before giving “Come On-A My House” to Clooney, he had convinced Frank Sinatra to record the truly dismal “Mama Will Bark,” the lyrics of which were sung from the point-of-view of a romantic-minded dog and which marked the only time Sinatra was accompanied by canine barking.)

When Clooney told Miller she didn’t think “Come On-A My House” was her type of record and wanted to pass on it, the A&R executive sternly issued an ultimatum: Either record the song or be fired from Columbia’s roster. Clooney relented, but for the rest of her life loathed the song which made her a star.

Decades later, the song found a new generation of fans when it was used as the opening music for E! Entertainment Television’s popular reality series, THE GIRLS NEXT DOOR, which focused on the comic misadventures of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion harem. After half a century, the song co-written by a chipmunk had become the theme for the house built by a rabbit… something that could only happen in the zoo that is the world of pop music.

HEE HAW counted among its regulars not one, but two of the greatest guitar virtuosos to emerge from the world of country music in the 1950s and ’60s. In addition to Buck Owens, there was also Roy Clark, who had made his name backing up the likes of Wanda Jackson on some of her most blistering rockabilly tracks. Learn more about Clark’s stellar career in this episode of NOTES.

For those whose memories do not extend to the antediluvial era of the 12-inch vinyl record, an “album cover” was the decorated cardboard slipsleeve in which said plastic dinosaurs came packaged (and for which enterprising hippies often found alternative uses).

“Cover album” is the term used to describe an album comprised of cover songs, like 2005’s ROCK SWINGS by Paul Anka, wherein the teen idol-turned-cabaret singer assayed alternative hits like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” (the latter of which had already received a lounge treatment eight years earlier when Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme reimagined it for the LOUNGE-A-PALOOZA cover album).

But today we are investigating the “covered album,” a relatively recent phenomenon, one that is closely related to the cover album… but takes the notion a step further.

A covered album is what you get when an artist or group re-records an entire album from the past, and its ascent in recent years speaks to interesting trends growing in the world of pop music over the past three decades.

Before the rock era, nearly all recording singers and musicians were interpretive artists. Performers rarely wrote their own material, instead mining the songbooks of writers like Cole Porter, Yip Harburg, Irving Berlin, Andy Razaf and the many tunesmiths tinkling and toiling on Tin Pan Alley. But attitudes veered in the latter half of the 20th century, and especially during the 1960s and ’70s, it became a significant plus that performers and bands wrote their own material.

Then, in the 1980s, the new wave movement reinvigorated the interest in old songs. The cover album (and its cousin, the tribute album) has become increasingly popular through the ensuing years until the present day, when it has achieved a nearly ridiculous ubiquity. Nowadays, you can’t rifle through a CD bin without stumbling across a bluegrass tribute to Metallica or a string quartet tribute to Kiss. For artists still interested in the act of interpretation (and perhaps fueled by nostalgia for the album in an age when music downloading has returned the individual song to its place as the currency franca of pop music), there was only one horizon left to conquer… the covered album.

Prompted by the recent release of NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS, HERE’S THE SEX PISTOLS by Artichoke, Craven has been thinking about the covered album recently. Artichoke’s folksy take on the classic debut from the Sex Pistols marks the second time this particular LP has been covered, since the album was given a Near Eastern gloss in 2002 on NEVER MIND THE BHANGRA, HERE’S THE OPIUM JUKEBOX by the titularly cited Opium Jukebox, an outfit spearheaded by Martin Atkins, himself a former member of Sex Pistols singer Johnny Rotten’s other combo, Public Image Limited.

NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS… is one of a few covered albums that actually name-drop the original band in the title. Other examples include Claw Hammer’s reconstruction of Devo’s 1977 major label debut, Q: ARE WE NOT MEN? A: WE ARE DEVO (featuring liner notes by chief spud Mark Mothersbaugh himself), and in 2005, former That Dog violinist Petra Haden joined with bassist Mike Watt (who rose to fame with the Minutemen) to cover THE WHO SELL OUT.

Some classic rock acts are popular enough to merit multiple covered albums. One of the earliest covered albums came in 1988 when pseudo-fascists Laibach delivered their interpretation of the Beatles’ LET IT BE (which is the only time this album has been covered, although its title had been appropriated four years earlier by the Replacements). Four years after Laibach’s Wagnerian take on the Fab Four, retro vocal group Big Daddy tackled SGT. PEPPER, the highlight of which is a cover of “A Day in the Life” in the style of Buddy Holly.

Bob Dylan has had two of his classic albums covered. New York singer-songwriter Mary Lee Kortes gave a gender twist to Dylan’s 1975 masterpiece BLOOD ON THE TRACKS with her band, Mary Lee’s Corvette, and pop surrealist Robyn Hitchcock put his off-kilter spin on the oft-bootlegged ROYAL ALBERT HALL with his promo-only ROYAL QUEEN ALBERT AND BEAUTIFUL HOMER, recorded 31 years after the 1966 concert it recreated.

Pink Floyd has had both DARK SIDE OF THE MOON and THE WALL covered (the first as NOT-SO-BRIGHT SIDE OF THE MOON by the Squirrels and the second as REBUILD THE WALL by Luther Wright and the Wrongs), and even ’70s superstars Fleetwood Mac have spawned two covered albums: Dougal Reed’s lo-fi redo of RUMOURS and Camper Van Beethoven’s radically altered TUSK.

Perhaps surprisingly, the act to generate the most covered albums was the premiere punk pop band, the Ramones. At least three albums of the Ramones were recreated in the waning years of the past millennium. Chicago’s Screeching Weasel was first with BEAT IS ON THE BRAT, their 1998 song-by-song remake of the Ramones’ self-titled first album. (And indeed, Screeching Weasel’s entire oeuvre owes much to Johnny, Joey, DeeDee and the gang.) Later that same year, the Vindictives overhauled LEAVE HOME and the Queers took on ROCKET TO RUSSIA.

It’s hard to imagine the covered album fad continuing much further, but then one would have been hard-pressed to predict its rise in the first place. The world of popular music can not only be confusing, it can be downright befuddling. One thing is for sure — when an entire album has been covered years after its original release, it is a work that has ipso facto proven its cultural significance. Perhaps, unlike books, you can tell a record by its cover.

Although often denigrated by the cognoscenti… reviled by hipsters… and scorned by critics… HEE HAW, the long-running country music and comedy program which debuted on CBS and ran for decades on that network and in syndication, was responsible for airing some of the greatest names from the world of country music. Among its regular cast members was Buck Owens, the great guitarist who changed the face of country music — and influenced the Beatles in the process. On this episode of NOTES, we tell the story of the Baron of Bakersfield.

Consider, if you will, the secrets which surround the birth of the foxtrot. Although television programs like DANCING WITH THE STARS have helped make it cool again, few today realize how many questions swirl about this most iconic of American ballroom dances. For instance:

Who invented it? Was it the charismatic husband-and-wife team who (with the help of an openly lesbian manager and a black orchestra leader) chasséd from impoverished showbiz wannabes to world-famous superstars? Or was it the hapless vaudeville performer who quick-stepped into the limelight briefly, then promenaded into obscurity?

Why was it called the foxtrot? Did it gets its name as a result of having emerged from a veritable dance-floor menagerie? Or did it immortalize its otherwise forgotten inventor?

Was the foxtrot the descendant of white European dance traditions — or was it forged in the turbulent cauldron of the blues?

When it comes to the foxtrot’s lineage, dance historians have agreed to disagree.

Some say the foxtrot was invented by the celebrated Vern and Irene Castle. In 1911, living as itinerant actors in France, the attractive couple nearly starved to death. But upon being hired as “exhibition dancers” at a popular Parisian nightclub, the Castles became la coqueluche de la ville, and had soon re-crossed the Atlantic to headline a wildly popular cabaret act in Manhattan (managed by the openly gay Elisabeth Marbury), wherein the blithe spouses demonstrated many of the popular “animal” dances then sweeping the nation. With the advent of ragtime, America had come under the thrall of sexy new dances like the Turkey Trot, the Crab Step, the Chicken Scratch, the Grizzly Bear, the Possum Trot and the Kangaroo Dip — and as their star ascended, the Castles were happy to introduce new animals to the terpsichorean zoo. One such original dance, which the pair originally called the “Bunny Hug,” reportedly came to Vern Castle when he heard the duo’s musical director, the great African-American bandleader (and future military hero) James Reese Europe, playing a half-time version of W.C. Handy’s “Memphis Blues.” Shortly after inventing the Bunny Hug, the Castles renamed it the “Fox Trot.”

Alternately, some experts say the foxtrot was invented by a good-looking vaudeville performer named Harry Fox. In the summer of 1914, the New York Theatre, a famed vaudeville palace being converted into a motion picture hall, hired Fox (who changed his name from Arthur Carringford) to dance between films. Fox’s most popular routine was an adaptation of the two-step, a German dance which dated back to the late 19th century. This signature dance soon became known as “Fox’s Trot,” which itself was soon abbreviated to the “foxtrot.” The dance made a star of Fox, but only briefly; by the 1930s, the once well-known dancer was taking small, uncredited roles in films like FIFTY MILLION FRENCHMEN and THE CASE OF THE STUTTERING BISHOP.

Whether invented by the Castles or Fox, the foxtrot continues to thrive nearly a hundred years after its first gambol across the floor… making it a great American original, no matter what its parentage.

Whatever else you may think about the French, you have to hand it to them — they have a knack for language.

Take the expression “bon mot.” Literally translated as “good word,” bon mot has come to mean a clever riposte or a witty quip — and when a young Craven learned the phrase in the 7th grade, he found it easy to remember because it looked a lot like “bon bon.” Even at the tender age of 13, it seemed to him that what a bon bon is to the tongue, a bon mot is to the mind.

Bon mot is an excellent term to keep in said mind when considering the remarkable work of New York songwriter Stephin Merritt and his most famous ensemble, the Magnetic Fields. Not only do the expression’s literal and accepted meanings — and even its confectionery connotation — apply to Merritt’s relentlessly clever way with words, but (when pronounced properly) bon mot sounds a lot like “pomo,” as in “post modern”… and this, too, is appropriate in discussing Merritt’s lyrics. For instance, while earlier morose songwriters like Leonard Cohen or Morrissey might have confessed “I don’t know the score,” no one but Merritt would first acknowledge, “I’m no Nino Rota,” as he does in his 1999 song, “Reno Dakota.” And while representing perhaps not as prodigious a feat as writing an entire novel without using the letter e, as French postmodernist Georges Perec did in 1969, Merritt seemed to be mining similar pomo territory in 2004 when the Magnetic Fields released their eighth album, i, featuring only songs the titles of which began with the titular vowel.

Whereas it’s his lyrics which earned him the sobriquet of “the Cole Porter of his generation” by ROLLING STONE, Merritt’s musical ideas are often equally adroit, and certainly diverse. The first several Magnetic Fields albums were dominated by the synthesizer, but in recent years, Merritt has dramatically expanded his palette. The Fields’ sprawling masterpiece, 69 LOVE SONGS, which introduced the group to many new listeners when it was released 12 years ago, incorporated cello, ukelele and even accordion — the latter provided by frequent collaborator Daniel Handler, who is better-known to literary youngsters (and their parents) as Lemony Snicket, author of the hilariously glum children’s books which constitute A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS. Merritt also wrote and produced songs for the audiobook versions of the UNFORTUNATE EVENTS novels under the rubric of the Gothic Archies, and has branched out to composing for the stage in his collaborations with director Chen Shi-zheng, and his work on the recent off-Broadway adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s CORALINE. 2008’s Magnetic Fields album, DISTORTION, found Merritt exploring noise rock a la My Bloody Valentine or the Jesus and Mary Chain.

So those with an appreciation for a restless musical imagination and le meilleur des mots were excited the following year to hear that the Magnetic Fields would have a new album due in January, 2010, to be entitled REALISM. That record, when released, included no electric instrumentation, and explored the milieu of “late 1960s/early ’70s orchestral and psychedelic folk.” Which meant, despite his protestations to the contrary, perhaps this Cole Porter was a little bit Nino Rota after all.

NOTES is a cultural history of popular music. From the Archies to Zappa... from psychedelia to castrati... from wax cylinders to mp3s... NOTES is devoted to ferreting out the little-known and sometimes amazing facts behind the music that has accompanied American life since the rise of the industrial age.